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Left 4 Dead‘s Tank was terrifying for a while, grunting and crashing and smashing all over the place, before everyone realised you can simply set him ablaze then leg it. Something supposed to be so intimidating became a little pitiful, desperately chasing people around while his life ticked down. It’s left me wary of L4D creators Turtle Rock’s new multiplayer man vs. monster FPS Evolve, but a new gameplay trailer puts my mind at ease. I’ve been losing sleep over this. Tearing my hair out. Scratching at the walls until my nails tear off and I’m grinding bone.

The trailer shows an eight-minute round from all five players’ perspectives (four humans of varying classes and the monster) and evidently the big fella’s no slouch.

The monster in this showcase round is quite Tank-y (Evolve has several monster classes), swinging big pummelling arms into faces and tearing up lumps of the ground to hurl, but it’s also leaping long distances and spitting fire. The monster has an interesting dynamic too, being weak at first and needing to flee and hunt, then it begins to power up and start smashing in earnest.

I do wonder whether it’ll suffer from people not knowing how to play the monster. The human side is broadly an FPS with RPG-y abilities but the monster is quite alien. With five players in each match but only one monster, players will naturally be human more than a beastie and master that side a lot quicker. Will many rounds be ruined by highly-skilled hunters swooping in to murder a monster that’s wandering aimlessly? I wonder. The early weeks and months of a multiplayer games’ life are likely to determine whether people stick around. At least in Left 4 Dead’s Versus mode, the zombies had teammates.

Anywho, here’s the trailer. It’ll first show you a version of the round spliced together from the five players’ perspectives, but you can also follow their individual views by clicking on those annotated icons in the red bar. I do hope there’s a tool to automate having five different annotations on every single second of that 52:35 video, or I’ll feel very sorry for the poor intern lumped with putting them in and feel guilty that publisher 2K put them through it to enterain us. We’re complicit, you and me.

22 Comments

I think you’re right to note the game’s design completely hinges on the monster having some idea of what they should be doing.

I could see it leading to a situation where Turtle Rock makes the monster completely unbalanced at launch, and then as people figure out how to play it, slowly scale back its power in each update they do.

Wot I think the developers should do, is make matchmaking or the server browser sortable by side (human/monster). So people that want to play monster can practice up and get good at it, and people that want to play human don’t have to play as monster (I’d much rather have three teammates by my side than be a behemoth).

Having played an early build of the game for multiple hours, I can tell you this : if the monster doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s going to get destroyed very quickly and if the Trapper in the mercenary team doesn’t know what he’s doing then the humans will get destroyed very quickly.

I wouldn’t say that. When half the opposition goes Engineer, establishes a nest and then uses constantly maintained level 3 sentry guns to essentially keep Hale in the air with a hail of bullets each time he attempts to leap in their direction it becomes less fun by the second.

I think Turtle Rock are chasing the fool’s gold of a multiplayer game which both pits drastically unbalanced sides against each other AND is sustainable long-term. This will go the same way as L4D. Once the powergamers get hold of it, the lack of balance between the teams will show.

This looks rather pretty and rather awesome compared to the CODBLOPS that have dropped recently.The physics of melee attacksof the monster hitting the humans could need some more dramatic ragdolling and accuracy for my taste but this looks to be quite the thrill ride already.

They better have some competent tutorials for the monster experience though, otherwise this will be known as the duckhunt 2014 simulator.

Color me unimpressed so far, the monster is essentially a firebreathing Tank from L4D. The gameplay seems to revolve around the monster being a bullet sponge instead of players making strategic choices on how to “capture” the beast.

Maybe things will change, but right now it’s like playing dodgeball instead of chess, in which I don’t anticipate a long lifespan for this thing.
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In a sea of military shooters, this looks nice. I don’t like that the monster either side can take THAT much amount of damage though. It just feels wrong, how they’re dancing around each other. Not like hunter and prey anymore.
I also think the animations are too generic. Look how the monster is eating the animals – boring. It doesn’t even move them.

This looks like a really well-designed innovative game. And also they are using a proper engine this time and not that terrible Source engine they were stuck with for Left 4 Dead, so they can potentially realize more of their vision. That said, this seems like a really tough if not impossible game to balance. I do hope there’s purely PvE options for BOTH monster and hunters, so people can practice against the AI in coop (or single) against the monster and against AI-controlled hunters as well. We’ll see though, this is definitely a very exciting game.